


Of Lightsabers and Other Broken Things

by I_Need_a_Boat



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Ben is a sassy bitch like his father, F/M, Fix-It, Hurt/Comfort, It's Anakin's turn for the brain cell, Post-Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, Rey and Ben share one brain cell, Rey catches a break for once, Saving Ben Swolo, The author regrets all
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-25
Updated: 2020-01-13
Packaged: 2021-02-26 05:20:30
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 4
Words: 10,625
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21947965
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/I_Need_a_Boat/pseuds/I_Need_a_Boat
Summary: She’s pushing eighty miles an hour on the shitty speeder as she races back toward home.And when she gets there, Anakin’s apparition is there waiting for her, his arms folded across his chest and anI-told-you-soexpression on his face.“What changed your mind?” He asks her, but she’s sure he already knows the answer.“I’m in love with the bastard. Now help me bring him home.”In which Anakin Skywalker finally guides his grandson back to the light.
Relationships: Kylo Ren/Rey, Minor or Background Relationship(s), Poe Dameron/Finn, Rey & Anakin Skywalker, Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 62
Kudos: 455





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I’m a buffoon, I originally posted this as a full work but this will be multi chapter. Sorry about that folks.

The worst part of having your soulmate die in your arms, was the sleeplessness it brought.

Day fifty nine on Tatooine, and still the night terrors chased her. Brief glimpses and flashes of a face that she can’t attach to a name without unlocking a floodgate of trauma makes her wake up drenched in cold sweat and screaming her lungs sore. She’d scared the hell out of BB-8 a dozen of times now.

The purple smudges underneath her eyes has become a permanent feature of her face, and when she trudges into town with her scavenged parts to sell, people avoid her at the visage. She’s glad for it, thankful these people know she’s not in the market for small-talk or being swindled.

But at night, when she lays motionless in bed staring at the ceiling, she wishes that sleep would ram into her like a falling boulder.

Every once in a while, a blue halo of light shrouds her room, and she can smell Luke’s irritation before she sees it.

“You’re giving Leia a hernia, you know that don’t you?” He’s always the embodiment of the grouchiest uncle to ever exist.

Rey feels a pang of guilt at that, but mostly she just hurts. “I’m sorry. I’m recovering. Palpatine ripped half my life force out.”

It was the mantra she told herself daily. _I’m recovering. Palpatine did this. I’m recovering._

The look on Luke’s face is never as convinced as she wants it to be. Rey isn’t nearly as convinced as she wants to be. Because stowing away to Tatooine, blocking calls and contacts from her friends, going back to scavenging old imperial ships buried in the desert sands, it doesn’t feel like recovering. 

It feels like slow suicide.

Luke sighs, weary, and presses the blue apparition of his hand to her forehead. She leans into the touch, so used to being starved of physical contact and forgetting that there are still people in the galaxy who care about her. 

“Come on kid. Get some sleep,” He urges her softly, and they’re the last garbled words she can hear before she drifts off. 

When she wakes up three hours later, alternating between screams and sobs, her sheets twisted in her hands, she decides she won’t let Luke do that again. 

But she always lets him. 

Her nights are haunted by ghosts, but her days are time that she won’t allow herself to crumble. Rey’s as strong and able as she’ll ever be, and she feels powerful in her body. The Force thrums around her like a permanent armor, fluctuating like the tides. 

She makes fast enemies with the Jawa population. They’ve ambushed her scavenging on several occasions and she’s retaliated in the same way by ambushing their sandcrawlers, laughing as she force leapt from different windows on the mechanical beast to pull Jawas out and toss them to the sand at a thirty foot drop.  The Tusken Raiders are wary of her, have learned the trouble with Jedi, and they develop a mutually beneficial relationship of ignoring each other. If she passes them in the sands, she’ll nod, and they’ll nod back to her. 

Scavenging was something she’d never wanted to stoop to again, but after years of fighting battles and nursing injuries that stung less and less each time they inflicted, she figured this was the better life path. When you’re a scavenger, you don’t make friends. You have less people to lose. 

Rey thinks that if there’s any positive outlook on this whole thing, it’s that there’s no one left to leave her. Everyone who mattered had now. 

The telecoms and buzzes she receives from Finn and Poe tell otherwise, but she told herself that they didn’t count. She’d left them. Because the idea of them leaving her stung. 

After a few weeks, the days start to blur together. Rey buys a new vaporator, decides she’ll take to moisture farming. She’s almost done raking the sand out of the hut that had seeped through after decades of neglect. 

And at night, she cries because she misses Ben Solo.

___________

On the night of day one hundred sixty nine on Tatooine, Rey feels the suck and vortex of a visitor of the Force standing outside her hut. But Luke had been here last night, and his visits were far few between nowadays. 

There were only so many people who’d want to visit her.

Her heart in her throat, she practically falls out of bed, engaging in a wrestling match with her sheets to make it to her bedroom door. Her hands are trembling, and her breaths are coming out in short, strangled fragments as she stumbles through the darkened hut.

When she makes it outside, the cool night air kisses her skin in places that ached, and there is the blue figure of a man standing not too far off, facing the horizon. At the sound of the hut door falling closed, he turns to look at her. 

Rey’s heart slows. It wasn’t who she was hoping to see.

“Hello Rey,” Says Anakin Skywalker, with a brief half-smile. He’s conventionally handsome, with a sharp jawline and wavy bronze colored hair. There’s a scar that stretches down from his eyebrow to his cheek, and it makes Rey’s jaw clench.

There’s an empty cavity in her chest that had caved after Exegol. Right now, still on the decline of that momentary adrenaline where she thought maybe, _just maybe_ , she’d see _him_ again-

The hole gapes ever wider.

“Hi,” Rey says, her voice coming out in a whisper. She twists the fabric of her night-shirt in her hands, trying not to feel afraid. Darth Vader was essentially standing on her front lawn. 

“Interesting place to choose to live,” Anakin muses sardonically as he takes in the sprawling horizon of dust and sand. “I thought you’d be sort of tired of sand planets, all things considered. I’ve never liked sand much.”

Rey blinks, mystified by the man. This was the Sith Lord who’d slaughtered thousands?

Rey has to remind herself that it isn’t fair to judge him when she’d declined to judge others for the same sins. And Anakin had fallen to the light, just before he passed.

There seemed to be a trend with that in this family. 

“I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be blunt, but why are you here?” Rey asks him, her guard up and defenses ready. Anakin turns to look at her again, and his eyes are cool and steady. They were eyes she knew, eyes she’d seen in someone else. 

“I’ve been wanting to talk to you. About my grandson.”

Rey wrestles with the desire to beg to know why he hasn’t visited her yet. Wants to ask him if he was okay, if he’d found Luke and Leia. 

But she doesn’t. 

Rey sighs tiredly, and her words are cold and empty. “What about him?” 

“Well, he’s in a bit of a predicament. Ben is- well he’s stuck.”

Rey makes a face, somewhere between baffled and miserable. 

“Is that meant to be a joke?” Rey spat accusatorially, finding the words cruel. “What do you mean he’s _stuck_?”

“I mean he’s not here, with us in the Netherworld. He hasn’t entirely separated from the physical plane of the galaxy,” Anakin continues, his tone down-to-business and offering no room for debate. But as the words leave his mouth, Rey closes her eyes and begins to shake her head. 

His words taunt her, offer new _what-if’s_ that she isn’t in the healthy frame of mind to contemplate. They plant a seed of hope in her that she won’t allow to grow, because she can’t take that kind of disappointment now. She’d lost too much, she had so little of herself left. 

“You are _obviously_ here to torment me,” Rey whispers breathlessly, her throat closing up involuntarily.

“The bond you both forged was deeper and stronger than anything this galaxy has ever seen,” Anakin says, firmly ignoring her protests. “A dyad in the force. Two that makes one whole. One can’t flourish without the other, and apparently,” He sighs, “can’t die without the other.”

“Go away,” Rey mutters, turning back to walk into the hut. She catches the alarmed look on Anakin’s face as she turns.

“Rey, wait, Ben can still be-“

“Do _not_ ,” and Rey shouts the word, then closes her mouth, because she’d never been one for losing her composure in front of strangers. And that’s what Anakin Skywalker was to her, even though his face stole features from someone she missed desperately. “Do not say his name like you cared for him. He worshipped you for years, and you could not spare one _moment_ in your infinite wisdom and afterlife to help a frightened boy who couldn’t separate right from wrong,” She growls, so unsatisfied with the guilted look on the former Sith’s face. 

Rey wanted him to know how Ben had hurt. How he’d hurt for years, listening on the static end of a line, listening for any words of guidance from someone he’d looked up to. 

What a load of shit.

“You love him,” Anakin realizes, not a question. 

Rey closes her eyes. She could only damn Ben for making her love him so many times in a day.

“Then why are you giving up on this?” He asks her, his face still so baffled and unbefitting of a projection of the Force. Wasn’t there supposed to be otherworldly wisdom passed on after death?

“Because I’m tired. And I don’t believe you. And everyone who I’ve ever cared about leaves me,” Rey says miserably, her eyes burning with tears that shamed her. “Every. Single. One,” She enunciates, each word said like another nail in a coffin.  “So don’t dangle him in front of me like a prize. He won’t come back, and I’ll have to live with the pain of losing him all over again if I try. If whatever you’re suggesting didn’t work,” Rey swallows, and shudders. “I can’t live with that kind of loss. I’ve lived with it too many times already.”

Silence blankets the two Jedi, and Rey finally turns back to the door of her hut. 

“Rey,” Anakin says. Rey’s hand freezes on the door handle, but she doesn’t turn to look back at him.

“He started loving you the day he met you. He was terrified of what you made him feel.”

Rey screams and detaches her saber from her belt, lashing back around to ignite it in the same moment she threw it at Anakin. 

But he’s already gone, reduced to a whisper of blue smoke and her lightsaber in the sand.

___________

There’s something she’s been hiding in her pack, too scared to take it out and risk falling to pieces. 

But that night, angry tears frozen stiff on her cheeks and hating Anakin Skywalker with his determination in what he believed, she finally unzips the pack. Taking an unsteady breath, she pulls out Ben’s black, long sleeve shirt. It’s torn and tattered in different places, the sleeves almost in shreds, but it’s his. 

There’s a childlike innocence that makes her wrap the sleeves around her shoulders, and hug the midsection, trying to imagine herself hugging the boy who wore it instead. 

She falls asleep that way, clinging desperately to Ben’s shirt. 

She gets three hours of sleep that night. 

___________

That morning, before the sun has even risen, Rey gets out of bed. 

Her morning routine is not a special one. She changes out of her nightclothes, a pale, blue loose fitting shirt and a pair of soft brown pants, into her tan robes. She brushes the snarls out of her hair, and throws them into the three buns that her mother had taught her when she was barely a toddler, and stares at the gaunt image of her reflection in the foggy mirror she owns. She eats what little she has, and she meditates. 

But this morning was different. This morning, she changes as quickly as she can, and leaves the hut. 

She couldn’t let her mind be too still after the night before. Behind a locked door in her head, there were hopeful thoughts, intrusive thoughts that were pounding to get free. 

There’s an old Hutt palace that the locals are afraid of. 

They claim it’s haunted by the vengeful spirit of it’s master, slain by a powerful woman bound in chains, aided by a Jedi Knight, and a scoundrel smuggler. 

Rey had felt a ghost of a smile at the old story, sniffed a laugh, and decided it was worth a stop for scavenging. If the locals were too afraid to touch it, then there could be old relics of the past trapped inside for her to sell or make use of.  She has to start up her old speeder to cross the Dune Sea in order to reach the giant palace monstrosity. When she catches sight of the three fat spires of the ruins, Rey almost has to laugh, because if the Jawas hadn’t already stripped the place clean, she’d be scavenging for months at least. 

Rey makes her way inside by scaling up the steel walls, and slipping in through a window. When she lands on the ground, the dust unsettles, and she coughs as her eyes water. 

The place is a wreck, decaying after years of neglect and misfortune. 

Like a ghost, she haunts the different rooms with potent curiosity, her eyes alive and bright. Rey finds nothing monetarily valuable amongst the rubble and trash, but everything she sees was touched by someone important. 

Maybe Jabba the Hutt. Maybe Luke, or Leia. Maybe Han. 

When she finds the throne room, she sits on the steps in front of the carbonite block that Han Solo had been trapped in, and stares.  Something in her heart hurts when she looks at it. 

_Because Leia never gave up on Han. Leia fought for Han. Leia kept believing he was okay._

Rey is running before she can think about what she’s doing. She’s leaping from a window, and slides off the wall of the palace to the ground where her speeder is waiting for her.  She’s pushing eighty miles an hour on the shitty speeder as she races back toward home.

And when she gets there, Anakin’s apparition is waiting there for her, his arms folded across his chest and an _I-told-you-so_ look on his face.

“What changed your mind?” He asks her, but she’s sure he already knows the answer. 

“I’m in love with the bastard. Now help me bring him home.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “This is far from the point, and I’m not here to squabble with some twelve year old boy,” Anakin grunts, suddenly sounding and looking very much like Luke. 
> 
> “I’m twenty, and I’m a girl,” Rey retorts flatly. 
> 
> “Don’t argue with a ghost,” Anakin tells her.

Rey has a plan, for when this all inevitably backfires.

For once, Rey discovers something on her own, instead of by the whispers of Mos Eisley locals. She’s blasting 70 miles per hour through the Dune Sea, aiming for some old imperial ruins to find parts for her new Vaporator, which was turning into a fast money pit.

Thinking so dolefully on the subject her waning number of credits and pits, she almost drives right into one. Her attention catches as the last second, and she has the jerk back hard on the steering. She grunts as she and the bike topple forwards into the sand, rolling for a few feet then coming to a halt only a short distance from the edge.

Rey stares into the pit, and locks eyes with what she ganders must be a Sarlacc.

The beast cries out at her uninvited presence, it’s long tendrils lashing out wildly against the walls of the pit, and it’s wide maw gaping far open. Rows of lethal, yellowing teeth ridge the edge of the pit. One of the closer tendrils lashes violently towards her, aiming to turn her into dinner, and Rey can’t stop the gasp that escapes her as it slams into the sand, only just a few feet from her. If she’d rolled just four feet more, she might have been less lucky.

Or maybe she would have been more lucky that way. The emotions in her didn’t stir to care.

Rey stares into the beasts open maw for longer than she’s comfortable of admitting. She contemplates terrible things, looking into the black void.

She would just have to roll in.

But BB-8 would be all alone, abandoned in their hut until someone finally came looking for her. So she gets back up, kicks the hell out of her speeder to get it started, and rides home. And when she gets home, she pets the top of BB’s metal head, listens to the contended whirs and chitters he makes, and feels guilty for ever having considered leaving him all alone.

But if Anakin’s plan fails, she suspects she won’t feel as bad rolling into that pit.

She’s actually sleeping for once when Anakin swirls back into existence, shrouded in a bright blue glow. He takes in the way she sleeps for a moment. The way she curls around the black fabric of a shirt that screams Ben Solo, the disturbed expression on her face, the tremors that affect her whole body.

Anakin folds his hands in his robes, and releases a long, heavy sigh.

The heartbreak, the sheer _grief_ she felt rolled off of her in waves. She was not allowing herself to mourn, so her grief took the shape of her dreams. That much he could tell, just from the purple bags under her eyes.

A little nudge in the Force on Anakin’s side was what woke her, and she’s sitting ramrod straight with her hand on her lightsaber in the quickest movement he’s ever seen. When her eyes, wild and afraid, land on Anakin, her stiffness only then releases just a fraction. Her hand still lays subconsciously on her lightsaber.

Rey takes a slow breath in from her nose, and lets her shoulder go slack.

“Anakin.” Her voice is hoarse from sleep.

Their last encounter had been brief, but important. She told Anakin she’d help bring Ben back, and he told her he was glad for it. He promised her that he’d return again when he had more of an idea of what exactly they were dealing with, and Rey steeled herself to be patient.

That had been two weeks ago. Rey wasn’t _that_ patient.

“You took your sweet time,” Rey mutters, slipping her legs over the side of the bed to rub the feeling back into them. Anakin sniffs a laugh at that, bemused.

“Resurrection isn’t exactly a quick study. And in case you’ve forgotten, I’m dead, so what I can do is extremely limited. Most of this rests on you, Rey,” He explains, noting the nervous way she bounces her right leg.

She sounds miserable. “What do I have to do?”

“Have you tried reaching out to Ben through the connection of your bond since he died?” Anakin asks analytically.

She’d tried, just once. A simple pull on the end of her line, trying to coax something, anything from his side. Even if it were a soft ‘hello’, or a sign that he was okay. But his only reply was a roaring silence that filled her with such _loss_ -

She’d decided she wouldn’t try again.

“Yes,” She answers, feeling empty. “He didn’t answer.”

Anakin hums slightly in disapproval, an unhappy look on his face.

“That’s not great news, but we can work with it,” He says doubtfully through a slight grimace.

“Your outstanding confidence is inspiring,” Rey deadpans, unimpressed.

“Watch it, brat. Aren’t you people meant to hold a modicum of respect for the dead?” Anakin sniffs.

“Did you just call me a _brat_?” Rey demands indignantly, her expression scandalized.

The ghost of the dead Jedi rolls his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose, already exhausted by this girls determination to roll him over in his grave. He cannot fathom why the Force has blessed her as it has.

“This is far from the point, and I’m not here to squabble with some twelve year old boy,” Anakin grunts, suddenly sounding and looking very much like Luke.

“I’m twenty, and I’m a girl,” Rey retorts flatly.

“Don’t argue with a ghost,” Anakin tells her, but before she can open her mouth to do so, he continues. “You’re aware of the circumstances of being bonded through a dyad, yes?”

Rey shifts, like she’s itching to spark another argument, but forces herself to back down.

“We...share a life force. I’m half of him, and he’s half of me,” Rey mutters, reciting some of the garbled information that had managed to make it to her ears via Palpatine before he’d died.

“Exactly. Except it’s deeper than that. A dyad represents the most basic and important of relationships. Light and dark, good and bad, right and wrong. One cannot exist without the other without risking tipping the balance of the universe. Take one out of the equation, and the results could be catastrophic,” Anakin explains carefully, his eyes scrutinizing to gauge her reaction. “So I expect that the force made a loophole, so that we could bring him back. Restore balance again.”

Rey’s stomach rolls in fits of nausea as she nervously bounces her leg. She subconsciously bites at a hangnail, trying not to feel daunted by the magnitude of this information. She’s trying to stay calm, even despite what this could mean. It’s like she’s trying to keep her head above water, but she grew up on a desert planet and didn’t know how to swim.

But her heart is racing, because this is the most alive she’s felt in months.

“Just tell me what I have to do to bring him back,” Rey says, her voice steely.

“First things first,” Anakin starts. “You need to tell him we’re coming. So that he’ll be ready.”

Rey scrunches her eyebrows together, frowning. “I told you, he’s not answering my calls.”

“Try _harder_ ,” Anakin puts firmly, his voice giving no room for another alternative. “You only tugged the first you tried to call him. To reach someone beyond living but not dead, you will have to put every fiber of yourself towards it.”

“Easier said than done,” Rey mutters coldly, her eyes turning icy as they stared. “The effort of something like that would kill me.”

Anakin smiles with dazzling white teeth. “Which is why I’ll be helping you.”

“Hooray,” Rey says flatly as she rolls her eyes, but the look she gives him is almost something fond, almost trusting. She knows she’s being won over too easy, coaxed by the similar features he has to someone she cares about.

“Hooray is correct, you brat. You’re going to use my Force signature as a conduit to enhance your own, and use that to propel you. To do this I’ll have to drop every single Force barrier I’ve ever constructed. You might see some flashes of me you don’t like. Most of my memories aren’t good ones,” He warns her, his tone dark.

If it meant she’d get to see Ben, even for just a moment, she’d subject herself to a thousand of Anakin Skywalker’s horrible memories.

“Alright. Let’s do it,” Rey utters, steeling herself.

Anakin instructs Rey to sit cross legged on the floor, and nudges her slumped back with his knee to straighten her. She shoots him a rueful glare, to which he snorts. Then he sits down across from her in the same position, his legs folded and hands on his knees. Rey’s heart is already pounding in anticipation, and in a nervousness that this won’t work. That Anakin’s Force signature won’t be enough to help her, and she’ll die. Or worse yet, she’ll try and fail, and be forced to live knowing she wasn’t enough. 

“You sure you don’t want to change first?” Anakin asks sardonically, eyeing her rumpled sleep clothes with mild distaste.

Rey glares at him with such malevolence that he raises his hand in surrender.

“Hey, just asking. He’s your boyfriend, not mine,” Anakin says under his breath.

Resisting the urge to punch a ghost in the throat, Rey closes her eyes, and inhales slowly through her nose. Across from her, Anakin does the same.

Rey puts the physical world behind her, and focuses on the Force instead. The Force bends and moves around her at her will, a waiting weapon, a vigilant tool to aid her. She can feel Anakin’s force signature like a small flame, and she tugs against it with her own, like knocking on a closed door.

When his barrier drops, Rey gasps. Anakin’s Force signature is no longer a solitary flicker of light, but a roaring fire that threatens to burn her down. She struggles to hold it, cant find purchase on something so massive and untamed.

“Like lightning in a bottle Rey. Trap it. Use it for your own,” Anakin hisses through his teeth.

Rey clamps down on the roaring flames, grunts at the way it burns. She’s holding it, but it’s like trying to hold on to water. Every modicum of herself is burdened with the task of trying to contain the bursting fountain of power that was Anakin Skywalker.

“Call him. Call Ben,” Anakin grunts, fighting to stay still in her hold.

Rey’s breaths are choppy and fragmented, but she shouts down the line of her bond.

_Ben_.

There’s static silence on his end of the line, and it makes Rey want to cry.

“Keep trying. Keep fighting,” Anakin groans, his soul splintering.

_BEN_.

She’s tugging as hard as she can down the length of their bond, but the chord is loose, because there’s no one holding onto the other end of the string. So she decides she won’t tug the chord anymore.

She follows it.

She’s running, panting to find the end of that string, when she’s suddenly transported somewhere she’s never quite been. There is a vast, black emptiness that’s swallowing her, but beneath her is solid ground. A path is lit below her, and her eyes follow it, hoping so desperately with every fiber of her being.

Her eyes land on a man not too far off, his back turned towards her. But something catches his attention, and suddenly he’s looking straight at her.

It’s Ben, with his ruffled locks of raven hair and frightened eyes.

“Rey?” He whispers, his voice breaking.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Anakin fights desperately to procure the singular brain cell that Rey and Ben share, but Rey won’t let him.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Hurts doesn’t it?” Poe says finally, his voice broken. “To love someone with everything you have.”
> 
> Rey thinks of the dimples that Ben has when he smiles. 
> 
> “No. It feels good,” She whispers.

“Rey?”

Every pain, every single modicum of grief she’s ever felt crashes into her.

And then the moment is shattered, because Ben is ramming into her before she can even blink, pushing her into a hidden pocket of space and time that’s out of the way of the path they’d been on. Rey opens her mouth to speak, but Ben’s hand is over her mouth to silence her, his eyes begging hers to remain quiet.

He looks awful.

His face is gaunt, almost a grey hue, haunted by shadows and purpling bruises, and his waves of raven-colored hair are plastered to his face with sweat. He’s still ridiculously larger than her, his entire frame encompassing hers and he presses her into the wall of this small closet he’s discovered. His eyes search her for wounds or hurts that she could have been inflicted, but Rey can’t fathom why.

Something stalks past them, in that dimly lit hall that they’d been in, that causes him to tense. Rey feels tendrils of dark, immense power curl past her, sinister, and looking for something. Rey thinks she hears the hum of a lightsaber, but that’s impossible.

When the footsteps fade, Ben lets go of a shuddering exhale, and presses a subconscious kiss to her hairline.

“Ben,” Rey whimpers, staring up at him with horror.

He rakes a trembling hand through his hair, still trying to stifle his own rattling breaths. He hasn’t moved away from her, still caging her against the wall of wherever they were, his body pressed flush against hers.

“You need to leave,” Ben croaks, causing Rey’s heart to shatter.

“What’s wrong? Where are you? Who was that?” Rey demands, but Ben is shaking his head, his throat bobbing.

“I betrayed the dark side of the force, and I’m being punished for it. I’m not dead but I-” Ben’s voice catches on a hitch, and he has to swallow to keep going. “Half the force wants me dead and the other half wants me alive. I really wish they could just both agree on which,” He mutters miserably, his breaths fanning across her cheeks.

Something hard tugs in her chest, something that hurts. She gasps against the pain, but won’t let herself slip.

Anakin’s Force signature was fast fading, her hold weakening. He was slipping like sand from her fingers.

“Rey?” Ben’s voice hitches, fear seizing him like a vice. “What’s wrong?”

“I don’t have enough time, I can’t hold onto him for much longer,” Rey hisses through her teeth, trying to readjust her hold on Anakin, desperate to prolong these few stolen seconds with Ben.

There is a sound from not too far off, a thud of loud footsteps. Rey hears the crack and sizzle of a lightsaber igniting.

Ben’s lips are crashing into hers before she can register what’s happening. Rey desperately wraps her arms around his neck, needing him to be closer, and her breath hitches when his hands slip under her nightshirt and slide up the smooth valleys of her back. Their teeth clack together, and Rey can feel tears in her eyes.

When they break apart, they’re both shaking and breathing heavily.

“I’m coming for you. I’m getting you out of here,” Rey whispers through her trembles. “Just stay alive.”

Ben in shuddering as tears gather in his eyes. He smiles something weak and tender.

“You’re beautiful,” He whispers.

Then he’s letting her go, and she hears his running footsteps and more footsteps behind him in pursuit as her grip on Anakin finally slips. She’s gasping for air, the world around her crumbling.

And as she crumbles, she lashes herself out to hold on to Anakin, but what she touches burns too hot. She sees glimpses of a beautiful girl with rivulets of soft brown hair smiling at him, and she sees familiar, yellow eyes ridged in red, beckoning to him.

She sees the fall of Anakin Skywalker.

____________

When Rey’s Force signature slams back into her body, she’s gasping for air. Blood is pouring out of her nose in a steady stream, and she covers her mouth with her hand as she releases a rattling cough that shakes her lungs. When she pulls the hand back, it’s more red than it should be.

She’d really pushed it this time.

Anakin was nowhere to be seen.

BB-8 is camped next to her side, eliciting a number of frightened, unhappy chitters and clicks, rolling anxiously back and forth as she blearily tried to wipe the blood off on her pants. She reaches out a hand to comfort him, but her hand smears red down his orange and white exterior.

Rey knows she shouldn’t, that this was the opposite of what someone was supposed to do in this situation, but she curls up on her side. Sleep finds her as soon as she’s horizontal, pulling her far deeper than sleep was meant to.

Luckily, the Force moves in mysterious ways, because an ex-stormtrooper and trigger-happy resistance pilot had caught wind of a ghost living in Luke Skywalker’s old home on Tatooine, and an old Corellian heap-of-junk ship lands on her front lawn a few hours later.

____________

When Rey wakes, she has a splitting headache and she’s sitting up to reach for her lightsaber before she can register where she is.

Poe is standing stiffly across from her, leaning against her tiny kitchen counter with his arms folded. His face is flat and expressionless, the perfect image of quiet rage. He hasn’t changed much since the last time she’d seen him, still charming to look at and the perfect poster boy of the Resistance. His hair is slightly shorter, pulled back by running his hand through it too many times, and there are gray streaks beginning to show at his hairline.

They hadn’t parted on the best of terms.

It takes a moment for her to realize that she’s on her rickety kitchen table, and two bacta patches have been attached to her stomach. She begins to cough, wet and thick, her throat coated in mucus and maybe leftover blood. Poe reaches past her for something, and shoves it in her hand before she can say anything.

She stares at the glass of water.

“Drink,” Poe says simply.

“Poe, this isn’t-”

“ _Drink_ ,” He says louder, his face edging on something angry.

Closing her eyes and taking a deep breath, Rey swallows whatever she wants to say to justify herself and takes a sip. The water soothes the way her throat burns. Poe won’t look at her, settles for glaring holes into the wall next to her.

His voice is low and sad. “Don’t lie to me. Were you trying to kill yourself?”

Rey blinks a few times, letting the question sink in.

“ _What_? No,” Rey sputters, feeling her heart jump into her throat.

She thinks about that Sarlacc pit again. How easy it would’ve been to just roll in. A shudder creeps down her spine that Poe notices.

“What were we supposed to think? We walk in, haven’t seen you in _months_ ,” His voice catches on something, an emotional hitch that sounds like betrayal. “And then we find you, almost suffocating in a pool of your own blood. And after how you left... we weren’t sure how we’d find you Rey,” Poe says darkly, looking at her with acute loathing.

“We?” Rey asks weakly.

Poe’s jaw clenches. “Finn is in town. Getting more bacta.”

Rey had never meant to hurt Finn. But she knew it would hurt him when she left. She left anyway.

“I just needed time to- to process. Palpatine ripped half my life force out. I needed space to recover,” Rey recites, just like she’d told Luke a million times. She doesn’t believe it anymore.

“So that means you should jump ship in the middle of the night, steal my droid and hide out on this shithole for half a year without letting us know where you were? You won’t even tell us what happened on Exegol,” Poe shouts, his voice rattling her head.

Silence settles over them like a blanket, and Rey can’t defend herself of that accusation. Because leaving Poe and Finn behind was one of the most selfish choices she’d ever made. She was a coward for it. 

“Kylo Ren hasn’t been seen since before Exegol,” Poe’s voice is dim, lifeless.

Rey stills, her heart rate spiking. Poe is looking at her like he knows her secret. 

“Where is he Rey?” He asks quietly.

At that moment, the door to her hut swings open, and she’s on her feet in an instant. Poe is there holding her down before she can get to far, hands on her shoulders to push her back down onto the table.

“Easy, you idiot. You still lost a lot of blood,” He mutters, still refusing to look at her.

But when Finn enters the kitchen, carrying a bag of bacta patches in his hand, it doesn’t matter. Rey damns the blood loss and tackles Finn into the biggest hug she can manage. The bag of bacta patches drop, and Finn is wrapping his arms around her like he’s afraid to let go.

“Rey,” He breathes, relief coloring every pitch in his voice. Rey squeezes him tightly, burying her head into the crook of his shoulder.

“I’m sorry,” Rey’s words rush out of her all at once, terrified he won’t understand or he’ll hate her. “It was an accident. I’m so sorry. I’m sorry I left. I should have told you.”

Finn pulls back, anchoring her to him at the elbows. His face is open. Tired, but with a willingness to listen and understand. He’d grown so much since they’d met, but Finn had always been like this. Kind without having a reason to be.

He smiles at her, his eyes soft and warm. “We heard there was a hermit Jedi camping out in Skywalker’s old place on Tatooine. There’s only one person sentimental enough to go back to living on some dusty old sand planet just to get close to the Skywalkers.”

Rey gives him a watery laugh, unpracticed and shaky.

“Luke wasn’t that thrilled to find me here, but he likes to complain about the moisture farming every once in a while,” Rey tells him, offering her friend her own, weak smile.

Finn even manages to laugh a little at that, and it makes Rey feel better than she has in weeks. But it doesn’t last long, and his smile wilts faster than she’d like.

“You weren’t looking so hot when we found you,” Finn tells her, a frown forming. It doesn’t look right on his face.

There were a lot of excuses she could give. A weird local illness, or not recalling how it happened. It might’ve even been easier to tell them that she _was_ trying to kill herself.

“I was trying to reach someone on the other side of the Force,” She tells him. It’s a half-truth at best, avoiding the shouting match Poe would start with her if he found out she was trying to raise Ben Solo from the dead at worst. “I pushed myself too hard.”

“Why is it that anytime any weird shit is going on, it’s always the Force’s fault?” Poe mutters unhappily, his lips pulled back in a scowl.

“Who were you trying to contact Rey?” Finn continues, ignoring Poe’s unhappy grunts.

“I don’t know. Someone important,” Rey sighs.

  
__________

She lets Poe and Finn sleep in her room that night. She makes a bed on the floor for Poe, beats the dust out of her pillows for Finn, and makes an excuse that she can just sleep in the small living area at the center of the hut. But she leaves as soon as she’s sure they’re asleep, stealing away to outside.

She doesn’t hear it when Poe grunts awake, or when he stumbles out of her hut.

She’s sitting on the roof, and she winces when he sits down next to her.

They’re quiet for a moment, all except for the sounds of Poe shifting next to her, so that he can shrug off his battered old coat and put it around her shoulders. Rey never butted heads with anyone like she did Poe, but in the end they always still took care of each other. She would still die for him, and she knew he’d do the same for her.

“Kylo Ren. You love him?” Poe’s voice disturbs the stillness.

Rey freezes, ready for him to explode at finding her out, and ready to jump off the roof to her speeder if she had to. But as she carefully watches him, Poe doesn’t look angry or betrayed. His eyes lock with hers, and they’re sad.

“The way you and Leia used to look at each other when we talked about him during briefings. It was like you both knew something we all didn’t,” He says, his voice turning wistful when they spoke the word ‘Leia’. Members of the resistance always liked to call Poe the son that the general had always wanted, the perfect legacy to her name.

But it wasn’t his mantle to burden. And Leia already had a son.

“He’s dead, isn’t he?”

Rey thinks of those terror-infused moments she’d stolen with him, the way his body had pressed into her when he’d kissed her. He was still fighting to stay alive, still forced to keep running even after the Force had claimed him.

Her heart ached. She had to believe he was still fighting.

“He sacrificed himself for me. He’d still be here if it weren’t for me,” Rey tells him, her voice flat and emotionless. But tears still rim her eyes, and her throat bobs.

When Rey looks at her friend, he’s already staring at her, like he’s trying to put pieces of a puzzle together. His eyes scrutinize hers, and then he looks away, as if deciding something.

“I don’t know what you’re up to, but I’m not stupid. Whatever it is that you’re doing to try to bring him back, just count me in,” Poe grumbles unhappily, like he’s being forced to drink week old milk. At seeing Rey’s dumbfounded expression, he rolls his eyes. “Don’t give me that face, I’ve heard all the stories. Darth Vader turned right before he died, didn’t he? Fuck, I’ll never forgive him, and he doesn’t deserve a second chance, but it’s what Leia would’ve wanted. And I still plan to beat the shit out of him when he gets back,” He warns her with a pointed expression.

“What...how did you...know I’ve been trying to bring him back?” Rey can’t seem to articulate anything longer than three words.

Poe stares at her, something hardening in his eyes as he did.

“I know what it’s like to love someone that much. Where you’d do anything for them,” Poe says quietly, his jaw clenching tightly. There is hurt and pain that festers in his gaze. “I’ve done my fair share of trying to bring back dead people.”

Rey doesn’t know what to say to that, so she doesn’t. Instead she looks back at the stars, tries to map them in her head.

“Hurts doesn’t it?” Poe says finally, his voice broken. “To love someone with everything you have.”

Rey thinks of the dimples that Ben has when he smiles.

“No. It feels good,” She whispers.

____________

It’s another week before Anakin finds his way back to Rey again, picking up the pieces of himself that had shattered after he’d let her manipulate his soul in a way souls weren’t meant to be.

But in that time, Rey gives parts of the story she owed to Finn and Poe. Unwanted connections through the Force, a flick of a wrist to rip Snoke in half, being dragged back from the Netherworld by sheer refusal of letting her die. When she tells them about Anakin Skywalker and his insistence on helping her bring him back, they both seem wary.

These parts of her story are little pieces of herself that she lays bare for them, and it makes her feel vulnerable and scared every time she does it. But Finn thanks her for being honest, and Poe always gives a half-hearted noncommittal grunt of mild displeasure.

Poe and Finn have been acting strangely, Rey notices.

Rey enlists them on her scavenging expeditions, teaches them to climb and swing from ropes in a way that won’t kill you when you’re dangling forty feet in midair. Finn almost dies at least seven times, but Poe catches him every time he’s about to fall. They give each other this odd look afterwards, like they both have things they want to say but don’t know how. Before Rey can address it for herself, they’re always looking away from each other, going back to climbing.

Rey smiles between the two of them, thinking that she might know their secret.

When a blue haze settles over her roof a week later, after seven restless nights of little sleep and nail-biting, it takes everything in Rey to keep her from screaming at Anakin Skywalker.

“You must be a _really_ busy dead guy,” Rey deadpans, her voice oozing disdain and maybe something relieved.

She turns to look at Anakin, but he’s staring at the dark horizon, his face set.

“How many of my memories did you see?”

Rey frowns. “Not many,” She admits reluctantly. With intentions of trying to not be intrusive, she phrases the next part carefully. “I saw a girl. Your wife?” She asks, her voice gentle.

There is something so pained trapped in Anakin’s eyes. “My wife,” He echoes, a confirmation.

Rey watches him intently, but his expression doesn’t move. He’d reconciled with what he’d done long ago. Padmé was one of the glittering stars in the sky now, and he wouldn’t get to see her for a long time.

“I know how to save Ben. But you have to do everything I tell you.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Poe enters the race of trying to procure Rey’s Singular Brain Cell, despite the fact that Finn has offered him a numerous amount of his own, thousands of brain cells. Ben has an ouchie.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “You sure you’re okay with this? Bringing tall dark and extremely violent back from the dead?” Poe asks, his voice low and serious as their footsteps echoed off the walls of the tunnel. Finn slows, turning to look at his friend. 
> 
> “Why? Are you?” Finn asks reluctantly.
> 
> Poe shrugs, a less than happy look on his face. “He’s a murderer who’s in love with our best friend. What could possibly go wrong?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Long overdue chapter. Pinky promise Ben is coming next up.

“You can add this to the list of things I didn’t want to be doing at four in the morning,” Poe groans as his eyelids struggle to stay open. “Actually you know what. Add everything. Everything that isn’t sleeping like a goddamn baby at four in the morning is on the list.”

“I feel great actually, I’ve always been a morning person,” Finn says through a blasphemously contented smile, which Poe desperately wants to punch off of his perfectly adorable face.

How the _fuck_ was he in love with a morning person?

“You’re dead to me,” Poe says frankly.

Rey suddenly boards the Falcon, a ball of nervous energy and jittery movements. She’s trying desperately to hold herself together, but every part of her was screaming ‘let’s go’, because she was _so close_. Her heart had been pounding since Anakin had left in his swirl of blue smoke, and it hadn’t slowed.

Ben could be home for dinner if she didn’t mess this up.

“Hey, so are you gonna divulge your whole master plan to save your dead boyfriend anytime soon or should I take a nap in the meantime?” Poe’s voice flatlines.

“I don’t have time. I’ll tell you when we get there,” Rey says shortly.

“Thanks. That’s as unhelpful as it is cryptic,” Poe sighs dolefully.

She blows past Finn and Poe into the cockpit access tunnel, not noticing the knowing glance they trade at her behavior.

Chewing on her lower lip, she flicks several switches to warm up the Falcon, presses all the right buttons to get her going. It’s second nature by now, she knows the ship almost better than she knows the back of her hand.

Getting up from their seats at the Dejarik table, Finn and Poe move to follow her into the cockpit.

“You sure you’re okay with this? Bringing tall dark and extremely violent back from the dead?” Poe asks, his voice low and serious as their footsteps echoed off the walls of the tunnel. Finn slows, turning to look at his friend.

“Why? Are you?” Finn asks reluctantly.

Poe shrugs, a less than happy look on his face. “He’s a murderer who’s in love with our best friend. What could possibly go wrong?”

Finn frowns, his eyebrows knitting together as he contemplated.

“Nothing will ever justify what he’s done, that much is for sure. But people can change,” Finn says softly, his eyes foggy and distant. “I watched some of the most battle-hardened, revered storm troopers in the fleet put their weapons down. They had blood on their hands, but they didn’t want that life anymore. _I_ didn’t want that life anymore,” He shook his head, shuddering lightly as he remembered. “And I believe in redemption.”

Poe sighs, giving in to the soft look in Finn’s eyes as he spoke. There was no ducking out after a speech like that.

“Alright you sap. But if they start making out I swear I’m going to shoot him.”

Finn makeshifts face. “I won’t stop you.”

When the two boys reach the cockpit, Rey is already starting the takeoff sequence. The old Corellian freighter’s engines gives a subtle hum as they push off the ground, blowing up a plume of sand and dust.

When they’re off Tatooine, soaring through the speckled void of space and stars, Rey lets go of a breath she hadn’t known she’d been holding.

“You okay?” Finn asks her softly, resting a hand on her shoulder.

“Yeah. I just...always seem to have trouble leaving sand planets,” Rey utters underneath her breath.

_______________

When Poe lands the Falcon on Dagoba, it sinks about seven inches deep in mud, in almost the same spot an X-wing had sunk several decades before.

“I told you we should’ve parked it on the flatland,” Rey says sagely, shaking her head as she surveyed the damage.

“Was I seriously the only one who saw a Dagobah snake over there? Am I the _only_ one who realizes how stupid it is that we’re here?” Poe sputters agitatedly, doing a skittish dance around Spiny Bograt, which hissed and snarled at him reproachfully.

Finn is having trouble leaving the walk-rail, holding a staring contest with a vine snake that didn’t seem to like him at all.

“You’re both pathetic,” Rey deadpans, shooting them both unimpressed glares as she easily breezes through the swamp, ignoring the skitters and crawls of various marsh creatures.

Anakin hadn’t exactly gone to great measures to describe what she was looking for, spouting some nonsensical gibberish of ‘Lightsabers on Dagobah’ and ‘Great Perils of Old’ and other things that went in one ear and out the other. When she would ask him to repeat what he’d said in English, he made some crotchety response like ‘if I’d been half as dumb as you when I was your age,’ or ‘you’ve probably got too much sand in your damn ears’, and other things of that nature.

But as soon as they’d even begun descent onto Dagobah, she could feel tendrils of potent Force wrap around her like a blanket, nearly choking her with its overwhelming presence. There was powerful Light and powerful Dark here, and her mind was being tugged this way and that by urges to act on behalf of either.

Gritting her teeth and acting on neither urges, she begins trudging waist-deep through the swamps, letting instinct guide her.

She’s wandered for about ten minutes through thick, muddy water when she feels a soft blue light surround her.

She’s practically snarling when she speaks. “Anakin, I’m about _this_ close to beating the shit out of-”

Her eyes land on someone who definitely isn’t Anakin.

“You,” She finishes lamely.

“A difficult one, young Skywalker is,” chortles the small, wrinkled green creature that sits mirthfully on a gnarled tree stump not too far off. Rey isn’t sure how she feels about the old twinkle that catches in this creature’s eyes when they look at her. “Stubborn is he. As stubborn as you perhaps?” He contemplates to her quizzically, his long, pointy ears twitching.

“I beg your pardon?” Rey sputters indignantly, her brows furrowing.

The small green creature lets out another series of impish laughter, beating his two feet against the ground gleefully.

“Looking for something important, you are?” The old ghost croons.

Rey groans, continuing her march through the sludge.

“I don’t have time for riddles,” She grunts miserably, not noticing the way the creatures eyes follow her with some form of mischief.

“Would have been easier, had you not discarded your last sabers so easily, yes?”

Rey freezes mid-trudge, her jaw going slack as she turned to look over her shoulder at the ghost.

“How did you know I- you know what? Doesn’t surprise me. And in my defense, I have my own lightsaber now. Anakin wouldn’t shut up about finding these stupid ones anyway,” Rey sighs gloomily, her eyes overcast.

“Paltry weapons they are not. Discarded them, you should not have.”

“I wouldn’t have if I’d known that-” Rey huffs, frustration building somewhere in her chest.

Something softens in the old Jedi’s eyes when he looks at Rey. He can feel the conflict in her, the self-blame and despair she carried around with her like baggage. There is a hole inside of her in the shape of a person who’d left too soon.

But there is something vigilant in the way she continues fighting for a reward that isn’t promised. And there is something compassionate in the way she had turned young Solo’s heart. And even after all this time, her hope had not dwindled.

With a soft hum, he lets his eyes fall closed, and he reaches out a hand to the sky, his fingers spread. The Force thrums around the area calmly, and two objects detach from the mud twenty yards away, spinning aimlessly through the air towards them.

Rey has to jump to catch both objects as they nearly fly past her, letting out a nervous gasp as one almost falls back into the mud. She clutches both mud-covered objects to her chest, gazing cautiously at her Force visitor. He smiles serenely at her through a half-lidded gaze.

“Belonged to an old friend of mine, one did. Belonged to an old foe, did the other,” He lilts, his gaze flitting from one saber to the other.

Wiping the mud away with her thumb, she ignites the first saber. With a loud crack followed by the soft hum and sizzle accompanied by any normal lightsaber, purple light casts shadows down the right side of her face. She inspects the long purple saber with some form of muted curiosity, quizzical.

“I didn’t know they could be purple,” She murmurs softly.

Turning her focus to the other saber, she mimics the same motion from before, wiping away the mud to ignite the saber. A sound more sinister than the last follows, a crack that sounds more like a scream than the ignition, and a low hum that sends a shudder down her spine. The left side of her face is set into shadow by obtrusive, red light.

There is something oddly familiar about the way this saber feels.

“Was this Anakin’s...?”

She turns to ask her strange new friend a question, but he’s gone.

_______________

Deep breath in. Deep breath out.

She was close.

Back on the Falcon after taking an extraneous amount of time getting it out of the mud on Dagobah, Finn and Poe had retreated to the cabin station of the ship, opting to sleep instead of watching Rey bite her nails for the six hour trip to whatever planet she was dragging them to next. Their distraction and soft bickering being gone left her with only one option, which was to pretend to meditate while she tried to keep herself from tearing her hair out while she waited.

Anakin dropped by somewhere after her second hour of fake meditating.

“You look like shit,” He says by way of greeting. Rey smothers the urge to sucker punch him.

“Astounding. You’re as tactless as you are an asshat,” She replies loftily, not opening her eyes or breaking her meditation posture, her back straight and legs crossed.

Anakin snorts soundly, amused by their useless bickering. But the small upturn of his mouth doesn’t last long.

“When was the last time you slept more then a few hours?” Anakin asks her gently.

“I’ll sleep when Ben is safe,” Rey says shortly, wanting nothing more than to close the subject.

Anakin vigilantly remains stubborn. “You look exhausted. You should rest,” He says, noticing the irritated twitch in Rey’s eyebrow. Her posture has become stiff, wracked by a desire to flee but too prideful to do so.

“I’m fine. I don’t need you to worry about me,” She swallows, biting the inside of her cheek.

Anakin sighs exasperatedly, taking a few steps towards her.

“You can be mad at me when you wake up,” He says under his breath, extending a hand towards her forehead with the intention of putting her to sleep as Luke had done several times before.

The hand stops short of an inch from her, before Rey whips out her own hand and scrambles backwards. Her hand is raised in a panicked plea.

“Don’t,” She hisses, her eyes wide open and afraid.

Anakin draws the hand away, taken aback by the sudden change in her behavior. He analyzes the threatened way she edges away from him, the way her eyes flit from his hand back to his face. The fearful look on her face is a familiar one, because Anakin was accustomed to people looking at him with at least some modicum of fear. But that’d been so long ago. And during times he regretted. 

“I...wasn’t going to hurt you. It was just so you could sleep,” Anakin defends himself weakly, his eyebrows knitting.

“I know you weren’t. I know what you were doing. It’s just...” Rey trails off, struggling to find a way to phrase her next words in a way that didn’t make her sound pathetic. She stares hard at the wall.

“Every time I sleep I see Ben die.”

A silence settles over them, meaningful and sad. Rey counts the seconds of silence, marks them each as another second where Anakin Skywalker thinks she is the most pitiful creature in the galaxy, but she only gets to seven seconds when her count is broken.

“The Force has not allowed me to grant Ben much wisdom, since he was so heavily influenced by the dark from such a young age. It’s a regret I’ll take with me beyond the Netherworld when I travel beyond it,” Anakin says finally, his voice morose. “But taking care of you is the one thing I can do for him, while he isn’t around to do it himself.”

“I can take care of myself,” Rey cuts in quickly, her eyes flicking to him sharply.

“Oh I’ve been made abundantly aware. But everyone needs help Rey,” Anakin sighs, his crooked smile fond as he looked at her. “And I want to help you. Not just because Ben is my grandson, but because I like you. You’re a sand rat to be sure, but I was too a long time ago.”

Rey worries her lower lip, still reluctant to let anyone see her with her guard down.

“I just don’t want to watch Ben die again,” She whispers hoarsely.

Anakin looks sad when he looks at Rey.

“I can make it so you won’t dream,” He says finally.

A silence settles over them before Rey nods her head weakly.

“When you wake up, Ben won’t be far,” Anakin tells her, stepping towards her and extending the hand again. It’s the most comforting thing that Rey has heard in a long time, and her entire soul aches.

“I miss him,” Rey replies despondently.

His blue, glowing hand presses to her forehead, and she closes her eyes, slowly slumping into a small heap on the floor. Her face remains tight and strained, and she shivers softly as she goes. She sighs heavily as she falls, finally allowed this painless reprieve.

“I know,” Anakin replies as she falls into a dreamless sleep.

_______________

Rey wakes by gentle hands shaking her.

“Rey, we’re about ten minutes from docking at the coordinates you programmed in. I know you need the sleep but I thought you’d want to know,” Finn’s quiet voice informs her, practically begging her to fall back into the dreamless void.

Rey is sitting up with her eyes open with no time to waste. She’s on her feet and breezing into the cockpit with Finn not far behind her.

“Good morning oh sleeping beauty. How was your beauty rest?” Poe leers from the co-pilot seat, his arms draped lazily over the armrests.

“Eat shit Poe,” Rey sighs.

“ _Someone_ woke up on the wrong side of the cold metal floor.”

Finn gives Poe a reproachful slap on the arm, which causes Poe to settle a little. They share a fond look with each other that Rey takes a great notice to, and catalogues it for later to tease Finn about.

When Rey stares at the planet of Ahch-To, it looks a little like her saving grace. Like her salvation.

“That planet,” Finn says quietly. “I feel something down there.”

Rey gazes up at her friend, almost surprised, but at the same time not. Finn’s force sensitivity had grown tenfold since the last she’s seen him before Tatooine. She knew he thought she was unaware of it, but it radiated from him like lamplight. After all this, after all had settled, maybe she’d show him how to channel it.

There is a yellow lightsaber that she’s hidden in his pack that he’s unaware of. A parting gift, should she not make it off this planet.

Finn notices her staring, and clears his throat, his gaze falling to his feet.

“It’s Ben,” Rey finally says as they’re docking. “Ben’s down there.”

_______________

Rey is swift and frugal with her instructions. Finn and Poe are to remain on the Falcon and keep it running, because in the helpful and very explanatory words of Anakin Skywalker, “you’ll need a quick takeoff.”

She doesn’t like the implications of that and neither do Finn and Poe, but they don’t object when she finally descends the walk-rail, clad in her rain poncho with the hood pulled over her head. The downpour that beats down upon Ahch-To’s surface is steady and unrelenting, and drenches her the moment she steps out of the Falcon’s cover.

Everything that she did from here on out was strictly taken from the instructions of Anakin.

Rey stole away the rocky cliffs, not taking the time to appreciate the familiarity she knew them with. She could not stop to smile when she overheard the miserable gibberish of the island’s caretakers, bemoaning the abhorred weather as an omen of bad luck.

Feeling the air being stolen from her lungs, Rey makes a perilous jump from one edge of the jutting rock to one farther below, a depression in the cliffs that she’s all too familiar with. In the rocky depression is a wide, gaping hole, scattered in intrusive black vines.

“I hope this is just as fun as last time,” Rey mutters unhappily, bracing herself as she felt tendrils of dark-side energy wrap it’s claws around her. It squeezes hard, just like it had last time, but Rey wins the power struggle for control.

“If I drown I’m haunting Anakin in the afterlife,” She sighs wearily.

Squeezing her eyes tightly shut and not allowing time for second-guessing, Rey plugs her nose and jumps. Wind rips through her like unwelcome hands, caressing through her hair and clothes greedily, but the sensation is short lived as she plunges headlong into water.

Being the sandrat she was, she’d never exactly had the time to indulge swimming lessons.

She breaks the surface twenty seconds later in bursts of gurgles and gasps, spitting out water and trying to coordinate the movements of her arms and legs. Luck wins out as her hand finds purchase against slippery rock, which she pulls herself up and over. She’s still blinking away salt-water when her eyes take in her final destination.

The foggy mirror that sprawled over the caves wall looked just the same as it had the last time she’d been in the caves.

Her reflection is something she would have rather avoided if she could have. One look at the petrified look on her face is enough to tell her that she isn’t half as brave as she was selling herself out to be.She pulls herself slowly to her feet, not breaking eye-contact with her reflection. Her fingers graze one of the lightsabers at her hip, unclasping the cool metal from her belt to rest in her hand. When her thumb presses the ignition, she can barely hear the crack and sizzle of the saber over the sound of her own blood rushing through her ears. Purple light filters through the underground cave, and she breathes deeply in through her nostrils, closing her eyes one last time.

When she closes her eyes she sees Ben, and the soft way his eyes looked at her after she’d emerged from this cave for the first time. He’d loved her then, she realized.

It’s enough to propel her feet forward into a run, and her arm lashes out with intent purpose as her saber penetrates the wall of the cave, the mirror shattering into a million fragments and shards.


End file.
